THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
Come on in — we spruced things up a bit. I’m delighted about the change.
This year, for the first time in my tenure at the paper, our holiday recommendations include the year’s best books. That’s what you’ll find in the next pages: 2017’s best fiction and nonfiction.
How did we come up with the best? These aren’t just my favorites (although a few made the list). As The Times’ Book Editor, I rely on a broad group of freelance writers to review books for us. A few are full-time critics (not easy in 2017); there are also journalists, academics and novelists. Others are writers who do a mix of these things. After reading through their reviews, the books they were the most excited about — the most engaged and energized — that made the grade.
How these critics interpreted the books is important to me. Reviewing “Lincoln in the Bardo” by George Saunders, David L. Ulin focused on Lincoln’s sorrow over the loss of his son and the way he comes to understand his pain in relation to the ongoing Civil War. When I read the book — not being the father of a son — I was able to see what affected Ulin as I marveled at Saunders’ unusual multi-voiced structure, the bawdy humor and the way he imagined this particular world of ghosts. Similarly, I can’t be anything other than a white woman reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “We Were Eight Years in Power,” but I can see it through the eyes of critic Walton Muyumba, who brings his experience not just to the book but also to the arguments about racism in American culture that Coates makes.
This is what books do for us, and the best criticism too — provide a window into another’s experience, a chance for empathy and connection. It’s different from consuming push alert after push alert.
Not that there aren’t newsy books here — there are. There also are books here that we didn’t review — or haven’t yet. A wonderful book might slip past me; a writer might be assigned a book and then get pulled away by another project. For fairness, we excluded the books published this year by The Times’ critics at large (but if you seek out the latest from Viet Thanh Nguyen and John Scalzi, you won’t be disappointed.)
In this section, you’ll find 125 books in total — in addition to the best books in fiction and nonfiction, we have recommendations on audiobooks, coffee table books, stocking stuffers (some requiring pretty big stockings), YA books, books for middle-graders and picture books for little kids — some beginning readers, some on the cusp of learning to read.
The intimacy of reading words on a page is still a kind of magic — these forms going through your eyes to create a narrative voice in your head. It’s not that we have to learn something from books — although we can — but that to read is to fall in step with another’s consciousness. And that is books’ great gift.